Tag: LIHTC

Hours 0:00 – 1:44, 3/19/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment period:

People spoke on:

  • the proposed student housing on Lindsey street (much, much more to come)
  • San Marcos Civics Club, inviting Councilmembers to drop in.
  • In favor of turning the Mitchell Center into an African-American History museum, overseen by the Calaboose board. (This is an item on the Executive Session agenda, so I don’t have any other info on it.)
  • Five people spoke in favor of a council resolution calling for ceasefire in Gaza. (Discussed a bit last time.)

Items 1-3: Financial reports.  All about Q3 2023, which is last June-September.

How did last summer go?

We came in under-budget and over-revenue.  Great.

They also went through the special funds: Electric, Water/Wastewater, Stormwater, Resource Recovery, Airport, and Hotel Tax.  It all seemed like normal fluctuations to me, but knock yourself out if you’re curious to know more.

The auditors gave us a clean bill of health for 2023. You’re welcome to read that, too.

…

Item 16: We’re knee-deep in next year’s budget. I haven’t watched ANY of the budget planning sessions, because they’re dull as rocks, and I say this as someone who finds council meetings riveting.

I think this is the key part of the Budget Policy Statement:

What does “Eviction Services” mean? We’re helping the tenant and not the landlord, right? We’re not the baddies, are we?

In part A, “Mental Health Diversion” sounds promising. None of this got any discussion at Tuesday’s meeting, though.

I’m not sure what distinguishes As, Bs, and Cs. Funding level? Different departments? Urgency?

…

Item 17: The city bought Quail Creek back in 2022.

We bought it, but it wasn’t inside city limits. So now we’re annexing it. 

Google maps tells me that it looks like this:

Nothing I enjoy better than the derelict remains of former wealth, as it returns to the common good!

….

Item 18: LIHTC projects are low income housing complexes, where the developer gets some tax breaks in exchange for building affordable housing.  (We talked about LIHTC projects last month.)

These guys want to build affordable housing right behind the high school:

Great!  

How affordable is “affordable”?  

What this means is that there are 348 apartments, and all of them will be priced so that they are affordable for people making $58,401 – $70,080.  

What does “51-60% AMI” mean?

AMI stands for “Area Median Income”. In other words, the AMI is the middle income in the town. So then “51-61% of AMI” means these apartments are for people earning roughly half of the middle income, or a little more. On the poor side of the AMI though, for sure.

Hopefully you’re thinking, “Wait, what? How is $58K-$70K on the poor side, for San Marcos!?”

It’s not! Here’s where the hocus-pocus comes in. San Marcos is part of the Greater Austin-Round Rock Metro statistical area. The median income for a family of four in Austin is $122K. And therefore 51-60% of that gives you $58,401 – $70,080.

Now! What about down in San Marcos? Well, our median income is $47,394.   In San Marcos, 50-61% of $47,394 would be $24,170-$28,436.

People earning $58K-$70K in San Marcos are above the median income. These households are on the richer half of San Marcos. Not actually rich, but relatively well off for San Marcos.   It’s completely absurd to call this apartment complex “affordable” or “low-income”.  These are regular, market rate apartments for regular, old San Martians. 

But here’s the thing: they’re not applying for tax breaks from the city. They’re only applying to state tax breaks. So this isn’t costing the city anything. 

Still, they’re getting tax breaks from the state. Are they at least providing services that go above and beyond?

Eh, not really. Pretty bog-standard. 

City Council is happy with this because we’re not giving away any money. So they give it a thumb’s up.

Look, as far as San Marcos goes, this is fine. It’s housing.

But they’re still jerks! They’re diverting funding that would otherwise subsidize actual low-income housing. They’re getting a subsidy, without helping the people it’s supposed to help. It’s not technically illegal – we’re within the Austin MSA, so officially our median income is $122k. Just kinda shitty of them.

Hours 0:00 – 1:00, 2/20/24

by The San Marxist, posted in Uncategorized

Citizen Comment:

Almost everyone speaking was local small business owners who are salty about Buc-ee’s asking for a $3.2 million rebate.  They observe that, collectively, they create a lot of jobs, and yet none of them have been offered a proportional rebate.

I can understand their frustration! Much to discuss. Stay tuned.

Item 1: The Dunbar and Heritage District Area Plan

You’ve heard about VisionSMTX literally for years. (Discussed here, here, here, here, here, and here.) We’re neck-deep in getting it approved. 

There’s a side-hustle to VisionSMTX, which are the Area Plans. What this means is that a neighborhood get to decide what makes it special, and then enshrine that special magic spark into the city code.  This can be done well – “preserve these historical structures! More sidewalks!” – or it can be done poorly – “Create obstacles that keep poor people out! Micromanage everyone’s business!”

The first Area Plan is up! Here’s the boundary:

It’s a combined region that’s supposed to cover both the Historic District and the Dunbar neighborhood.

At P&Z, they recommended two big changes:

  • Split Dunbar and the Historic District into two separate Area Plans
  • Hold off until the Comp Plan is approved.

Splitting the two neighborhoods is a very good idea, given the historical legacy: one of these neighborhoods traditionally got all the resources, and the other was generally short-changed.  Making Dunbar the focus of its own plan seems healthy to me.

Council is also on board with both of these changes. So these new split Area Plans will now go back to the residents for revising.

…

Item 15: LIHTC Housing

LIHTC stands for Low Income Housing Tax Credits.  Apartment complexes can apply for tax breaks if they provide low-income housing and access to social services. 

Usually these are new complexes being built.  But this time, it’s an existing complex:

These are the River View apartments, in Blanco Gardens.

One note: River View apartments is directly across from the stupid Woods apartments, which is now called Redpoint, as though they can escape my anger by changing their name.

Presumably “River View Apartments” was so named, because it used to have a view of the river, before The Woods was built, and they should probably rename themselves “Apartment View Apartments” now. But that would be too grim.

Anyway: there’s 54 units, of which 40 are Section 8 housing. They were bought by a new owner two years ago who wants to use LIHTC funding to renovate them.

Council asks good questions!

Mayor Hughson: Will anyone be displaced by the renovations?
Answer: Temporarily, yes, but no one will lose their housing.  We’ll cover moving costs to a different unit or to a hotel during renovations. This is a HUD requirement.

Mark Gleason:  Why is it so vacant right now?
Answer: It’s 30% vacant, because the units were in such bad shape that we weren’t allowed to rent them until we fixed them up.  We’re about to get approval from HUD to start renting them.

Saul Gonzales: Are there enough washers and dryers? And are they priced affordably?
Answer: We’re required to have 1 set per 10 apartments, and we’ve got 6 sets, so we’re good.  On the pricing, we’ll blandly demur. 

Alyssa Garza: Are the wraparound services old or new?  What mechanism do you have to make sure you’re not just going to under-advertise and phase out services due to low participation?
Answer: They’re new.  HUD requires us to replace services that we phase out.

Council isn’t spending any money here. They’re just voting on whether to support the owner’s LIHTC application to the state. It’s basically just a vote of confidence.

The vote:

CLICKERS!!

Hour 1+, 1/4/22

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Some of the citizen comments:
– In favor of a committee for animal services. (Which is on the agenda tonight. Spoiler: it passes.)
– Problems with SMPD: Namely, Chief Stapp’s complicity in the negligence during the Biden Bus emergency calls, and how we continue to employ him. We need SMPD oversight by external community members, instead of recycling the same individuals to guard the henhouse, so to speak.

Public Hearings:

1. There’s going to be a gas station at the corner of 123 and Clovis Barker. Eventually. This is just before you get to the McCarty overpass, heading south.

2. Renewing some low income tax credits for a housing complex (Champion’s Crossing), right at the entrance to Blanco Vista, at Yarrington Road. It’s been there for a long time, 156 apartments.


Max Baker points out that the income percentiles are based on Austin median income, not San Marcos median income. According to this, Austin median income for a family of 4 is $99K. And hooboy, those are not San Marcos numbers at all. Having apartments priced to be affordable at 40% of the median Austin income is just a regular San Marcos market rate, and yet the city is subsidizing this.

It passes unanimously. Baker basically holds his nose and votes to grandfather it in, but points out that new projects need to clear a higher bar.

3. Transportation Master Plan
Mostly they hashed these details out at the last meeting; see here. Mayor Hughson raised one last issue for discussion: reduction of driving lanes on Sessom and Craddock.

Shane Scott and Mark Gleason come out against this. Scott is pro-speed bumps in order to calm traffic, although the engineer says that Craddock and Sessom are busier thoroughfares than what you’d normally stick a speedbump on. Gleason points out that there already is a crushed granite path on Craddock, from Bishop to Old RR 12.

(Does it really extend all the way to Bishop? In my memory, the crushed granite path starts out strong on the Old 12, and then dribbles to extinction somewhere along the way. Google maps agrees with me! I win. The existing path appears to end at Ramona street, and then turn into a sidewalk till Archie, and then it peters out.)

Gleason also makes an impassioned plea to future growth. Won’t the ghost residents of tomorrow resent our bike lanes? Max Baker points out that they might also prefer the bike lanes.

Mayor Hughson asks the engineer, Richard Reynosa, some of the key questions: how much does it cost to put the bike lanes in? how reversible is the decision? what are the traffic studies showing?

Reynosa says: It’s just the cost of striping. It can easily be un-striped. The traffic studies show that these streets can handle being reduced to one lane. He points out that Sessom already has been reduced to one lane for the past year, due to construction, and will continue to be reduced for the next year.

Gleason makes another semi-nonsensical plea – what will we do in the case of natural disasters? If there is a tornado or a fire, aren’t we courting danger by reducing these roads to one lane? (Nobody responded with the obvious response: Bro, we’re just re-striping the lanes. Cars can drive over stripes, especially to flee a forest fire.) Whenever Gleason stops making sense, I start to wonder who is whispering in his ear.

Gleason makes a motion to keep Sessom and Craddock as they are.

Max Baker makes the appropriate arguments in favor: bike lanes can actually reduce the number of cars on the road. Traffic congestion is often due to speeding, and not the sheer quantity of cars on the road. Craddock in particular is like a 1950’s drag-racing avenue, just yearning to be sped down, with its wide unfettered lanes. It needs to be calmed.

Jane Hughson is persuaded mostly because this is such a cheap, easily reversible investment. Why not try it out and see how it does?

In the end, Gleason’s amendment fails:
Yes: Gleason, Scott, Gonzalez
No: Garza, Baker, Prather, Hughson

The vote on the entire transportation plan passes.
Yes: Everyone besides Shane Scott and Saul Gonzalez.
No: Those two.

Honestly, Saul Gonzalez plays his cards so close to the vest that it’s impossible to know what his game is. What didn’t he like? I have no idea!